My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  I tell them they’ve done their best—now it’s up to the universe. Then I ask about current events or controversies on campus so I will know what to use as examples in my speech. After all, my job is to make their work easier after I leave than it was before I came. It’s already easy for me. I don’t have to worry about getting good grades, negotiating faculty politics, achieving tenure, publishing in scholarly journals, becoming department chair, or crossing other hurdles that those in academia have to cross. I can bring up problems and possibilities that students want brought up. I can also carry ideas from one campus to the next, in the bee-and-flower model of organizing. I’m here to make them look reasonable. After all, I’m leaving in the morning.

  At first, my student hosts may cite faraway subjects—say, global warming or foreign policy—as if only the big, distant, and well publicized could be serious. But since revolutions, like houses, are built from the bottom up, I ask what changes they want to see on campus and in their daily lives.

  In this way, I find out that, say, the business school is getting a new building while the college of education is still in Quonset huts; or that the state legislature has raised tuition and cut scholarships but is now paying $50,000 a year per prisoner to Wackenhut, which operates prisons for profit; or that military recruiters are offering impoverished female and male students big signing bonuses but giving little forewarning of combat or sexual assault statistics; or that faculty of color somehow never become department chairs; or that the mostly female nonprofessional staff is being paid bubkes and forbidden to unionize; or that fraternities are defending brothers against sexual assault charges by threatening to bring libel suits against the women who report them; or that a newly “out” lesbian basketball coach has to take a monitoring faculty member along on team travels; or that a law school professor is famous for asking only female students about cases with a sexual component; or that a male medical school professor hires prostituted women on whom to demonstrate gynecological exams; or that the football team spends a lot on Astroturf but not on preventing brain injury—and many other indicators of a need for change.

  In short, serious politics are happening right here on campus.

  After visiting a class or two, maybe having dinner with student leaders and faculty—where I find out still more about what’s happening on campus—we go to the lecture hall. There we discover that it’s already full, and people are waiting outside: Perhaps someone is hooking up a public address system for the overflow, or people are being put into rooms with closed-circuit television, and paper is being handed out so they can send in their comments for the postlecture discussion. In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also underestimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.

  Now the organizers are apologetic for thinking too small. Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women’s movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step. At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women’s libbers, “bra burners,”3 and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase-carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters responsible for a gender gap that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a “postfeminist” age, so we would relax, stop, quit. Indeed, the common purpose in all these disparate and contradictory descriptions is to slow and stop a challenge to the current hierarchy.

  But controversy is a teacher. The accusation that feminism is bad for the family leads to understanding that it’s bad for the patriarchal variety, but good for democratic families that are the basis of democracy. The idea that women are “our own worst enemies” forces us to admit that we don’t have the power to be, even if we wanted to. When occasionally a lecture hall has to be emptied and searched after an anti-abortion group has sent in a bomb threat, I’ve noticed that when we return, the audience has grown bigger out of support.

  So far, I’ve also noticed that, if an audience is half women and half men, women worry about the reaction of the men around them. But in one that is two-thirds women and one-third men, women respond as they would on their own, and men hear women speaking honestly. When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.

  Sometimes, hostility shows up, and that is educational in itself. Without campuses in the Bible Belt, I wouldn’t know that the belief that women’s subordinate role is ordained by God is still with us, or that it can take courage for a student from a strict Christian family—or a Jewish or Muslim equivalent—to go to any college that doesn’t teach the New Testament, the Old Testament, or the Koran as the literal truth. A student from Bob Jones University who sought counseling there after being sexually assaulted was asked to “repent,” as if she had attracted the assault. In Texas, I saw people outside an auditorium where I was about to speak. Because their signs called me a humanist, I assumed they were welcoming—until a former fundamentalist explained to me that because humanism is bad and secular, Christians were demonstrating against my speech.

  In some audiences, feminism is blamed for, say, divorce or plummeting birthrates or lower salaries—instead of blaming unequal marriage or lack of child care or employers who profiteer—but this is an education, too. People who arrive assuming that no one could possibly disagree with equal pay may learn otherwise from someone who rises to say that the free market takes care of that; unequal pay just means that women aren’t worth as much as employees. Anyone who believes we’re living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females—from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking—has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history. On the other hand, hearing men say they want to humanize the “masculine” role that is literally killing them, and that they want to raise their own children, keeps all those present from measuring progress by what was, and raises a new standard: what could be.

  Altogether I’ve seen enough change to have faith that more will come.

  I.

  · It’s 1971, and I’m just beginning to talk about the women’s movement—with Dorothy, not yet on my own—when I get an invitation to give the address at the Harvard Law Review banquet. This annual event is reserved for top students, and guest speakers tend to be political leaders or prestigious legal scholars—definitely all men. Once I discover this isn’t a practical joke, it’s an easy no. I tell them the woman they should ask is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a brilliant lawyer who was one of the first female students at Harvard Law School, and who has just created the first Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

  Then I get a call from Brenda Feigen, a friend who also was one of the early women at Harvard Law and who now runs the Women’s Rights Project with Ruth. She says I have to do it—Ruth will never be asked because she left Harvard to go to Columbia Law School—and besides, if I say no, they may go back to men-as-usual. Brenda promises to help with research and to ask current women law students to do the same. I remind her that my fear of public speaking is just as serious as her fear of flying, but she says I can write every word, and it will be more like reading than speaking. This and other arguments finally make me say yes to my worst nightmare.

  This is how I find myself on the Harvard campus with Brenda, interviewing women who make up just 7 percent of its law students. I learn that the segregated tradition of “Ladies Day,” the only time when women are called on in class, has only just ended, and that the faculty are still 100 percent white and male. So sure of themselves are the powers-that-be that the sign over the men’s room in the library stacks just says FACULTY. I write this all down and become even mor
e nervous. These students are depending on me.

  Ultimately, I find myself standing at a podium in Boston’s Sheraton Plaza Hotel. The Harvard Club of Boston, where the banquet is usually held, makes women enter through a side door. I look down at the long 1930s dress I’ve found in a thrift shop and see its velvet skirt vibrating slightly due to my shaking knees. I’m not sure how much this nervousness is audible in my voice—Brenda is pretending I’m fine; this is a piece of cake—but twenty-seven years later, Ira Lupu, then a third-year Harvard law student in the audience, will write his remembrance: “Her delivery was rhetorically unimpressive; she seemed nervous, and spoke quietly and without sharp effect or physical punctuation.”4

  He didn’t know the half of it.

  My speech is called “Why Harvard Law School Needs Women More Than Women Need It.” I manage to get through the main part, arguing that only equality creates respect for the law, and that only democratic families create democracy. Yet I know that the audience knows that women law students have provided ammunition—interviewing them has already created resentful rumblings among the faculty—and I launch into their testimony at the end:

  With this humanist vision in mind, you can imagine how a female human being suffers at Harvard Law School. She spends much of her time feeling lonely, since male classmates often regard her as a freak. She spends the rest of it feeling mad as hell. Much more seriously, the catalog betrays no interest in her half of the human race. There is a course on racism and American law but none on sexism. There is a course on international whaling law but none on women’s rights internationally. An eminent professor of administrative law said as late as last night that he didn’t know what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was. The same man replied to a request that at least one female full-time professor be hired by answering that women faculty brought problems because of “sexual vibrations”…and an eminent securities law expert used descriptions of “stupid” widows and wives to explain sample cases of stock loss….Professors may joke about the “reasonable man” test, explaining that there is no such thing as a reasonable woman. They may describe rape as “a very small assault”; gape at bosoms and legs in the front row; encourage the hissing and booing from male colleagues that often follow a female colleague’s classroom remarks on women’s rights; and use “stupid woman” stories or sex jokes that humiliate women to illustrate some legal point….From now on, no man can call himself liberal or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home or in the office. Politics don’t begin in Washington. Politics begin with those who are oppressed right here.

  I’m so relieved to be finished that I can’t tell whether the applause is approving, disapproving, or just polite. But then something happens that, I will later learn, is unprecedented. A portly man in a tuxedo rises from his table, his face flushed with anger, and protests not the content of what I have said but the very idea that I dare to judge Harvard Law School at all. I don’t know who he is, but I definitely know he’s outraged. When he finally sits down, there is silence in the ballroom—then talk gradually resumes, like an ocean covering a volcano.

  Later Brenda tells me this was Vernon Countryman, a Harvard Law professor of debtor-creditor relations. I’m unsure whether to be scared or proud of his response, yet something tells me it’s more the latter. He has embodied what women at Harvard Law School are dealing with.

  Only decades later will that law student in the audience confirm my feeling in the moment. “I remember being shocked that a Harvard Law professor could publicly appear so incoherent and out of control,” Ira Lupu wrote. “His remarks seemed designed to put Steinem in her place as a young woman untutored in the facts and values of the Harvard Law School, rather than to rebut her comments in any rigorous way. The banquet ended with the quietly held yet widespread sense that Countryman had underlined Steinem’s theme of male boorishness and disrespect for women in a way that her words alone could not do.”5

  Finally, Lupu solved the mystery of why I was invited in the first place. His belated essay explains that his then wife, Jana Sax, had felt “profound alienation from the principles and methods reflected in her spouse’s legal education.” She suggested me as a speaker, and the president of the Harvard Law Review said yes. We each played a role: a wife, women law students, Brenda, me, even the angry professor.

  In this way, Harvard Law School gives me a big gift: I worry less about hostile responses. Ultimately, they educate an audience. As the great Flo Kennedy will suggest later when we begin to speak together, “Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, ‘I didn’t pay him to say that.’ ”

  · It’s 1972, and Margaret Sloan and I are traveling to Texas campuses. One is East Texas State University, where future farmers study agriculture, and another is Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where future leaders study whatever they please. Yet as different as they are, a pair of women students approach us afterward with the same passionate message in each place: If you think this is bad, you should come to Texas Women’s University. Each pair is also one white woman and one black woman, unusual in itself.

  Back home in New York, we keep hearing from more TWU students. It’s a campaign to get us there, without a speakers’ program to pay expenses—at least, without one willing to invite us. Who can resist?

  Denton turns out to be a small town known for its rodeos and hot summers. Students take us around the campus of low buildings, plus one tower that is topped by the president’s office—like a warden’s aerie overlooking a prison, as the students point out. The good news about this state-supported women’s university is that its low cost invites women who might never otherwise be able to go to college, including black and Latina students. The not-so-good news is that TWU is known for two specialties. One is domestic science, which was originally a way of elevating women’s work in the home but has become a field that students feel is training them for marriage or domestic service jobs. The other is nursing, the most organized of the professions that are mostly female, but it is still paid less than such similar but mostly male professions as pharmacy. The worst news is that the many sexual assaults on campus have been met with fences, curfews, and male guards that restrict the victims, but not the victimizers. In fact, students suspect that a couple of the guards are the rapists.

  Margaret and I find ourselves in TWU’s main auditorium. It is packed with students and exploding with new feminism, combined with civil rights and black power, plus the newly founded La Raza Unida, a national party created by Mexican American leaders in Texas. Already, La Raza has confounded expectations by becoming the first national political party to support reproductive freedom, including abortion.

  Many of these students have experienced the double discrimination of sex and race—not only in the mainstream but also by race in the women’s movement, and by sex in the black power movement. They applaud when Margaret says, “I still have scars on my head and dust between my toes from marching across that bridge in Selma. Once I was left for dead. But when the organizing began, they asked me to make coffee.” They laugh with relief when she says, “I want to make sure that when the revolution comes, I’m not cooking grits for it.” As she sums up, “I’m not black on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and a woman on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.”

  Since many have also been raised with traditional southern ideas of womanhood, they also cheer when I talk about women feeling like a half-person without a man standing next to them, whether on Saturday night or throughout life. This would surprise men, too, I explain, if they realized how little it matters which man is standing there. More laughter, and cries of “Tell it!” They’re glad to hear what a black woman once said to her white southern sisters: “A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.”

  Though some in the audience yell out objections to Margaret’s sprinkling of four-letter words—after all, she is a poet from the South Side of Chica
go—she gets applause when she says that if critics don’t like the way she talks, they can leave. When someone asks me if I believe in God and I say no—I believe in people—I get a hushed silence. So I go on: If, in monotheism, God is man, man is God. Why does God look suspiciously like the ruling class? Why is Jesus, a Jewish guy from the Middle East, blond and blue-eyed? There is a relieved response of laughter, and even a few shouts of “Tell it!”

  At the end, the student organizers give us the highest praise: the result has been worth the year they spent persuading us to come. We have made them look reasonable by comparison.

  Home in New York, we read newspaper clippings from Denton that sum up our subject matter as “sexism, racism, job discrimination, children, welfare, abortion, homosexuality, bisexuality,” in a discussion described as “emotional, controversial, thought provoking, relevant.” There are also quotes from audience members who call this lecture and discussion “embarrassing” and “the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” It seems that people went away either angry or inspired. For Margaret, it’s a proof of need that helps her decide to cofound the National Black Feminist Organization—together with Eleanor Holmes Norton from the EEOC, Jane Galvin Lewis of the Women’s Action Alliance, artist Faith Ringgold, author Michele Wallace, and many others.